For a couple of centuries now, we have had to make due with Samuel Johnson’s famous phrase: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Thanks to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, we can now revise this phrase for the twenty-first century. Tthe last last refuge of a scoundrel, it appears, lies in taking up the battle against something called “Christophobia.”

Hirsi Ali coins this term as part of her alarmist and deeply hateful cover story for Newsweek. “The War on Christians” is splashed across the cover, but the actual target of Hirsi Ali’s piece becomes more clear in the title provided for the online version of the piece: “The Global War on Christians in the Muslim World.”

The terms of Hirsi Ali’s argument, such as it is, are all set out in her opening paragraph:

"We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm."

The criminally careless tossing out of the term “genocide” gives us a clue about what is to come. So too does the style, which is a classic version of her usual mode, that of the lone brave voice crying out about injustice in the wilderness, surrounded by dupes who are too busy portraying Muslims as “victims or heroes.” Fortunately, Hirsi Ali is prepared to offer us “a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends,” leading to what she sees as her inevitable conclusion and allowing her to coin her useful new term: “the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.”

Having already reached her inevitable conclusion in her opening, Hirsi Ali appears to feel little need to support it with anything so mundane as actual facts. Instead he offers a loosely-connected cherry picking tour that ties together incidents of violence against Christians and other religious minorities in Nigeria, Sudan, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, and Indonesia. All the instances she references are real and terrible acts of violence. And all of them are symptoms of complex political and social situations that need to be analyzed and addressed. This makes it all the more horrible that Hirsi Ali treats them as mere data to be added to her deeply simplistic argument. Indeed, she raises the same two points in each case: first, that Muslims are killing Christians; second, that the world (by which she means “the West”)—apparently distracted by its uncritical admiration for the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring and its obsession with stamping out Islamophobia—stands idly by and watches. So Hirsi Ali is forced to beg her readers to help break what she refers to as a “conspiracy of silence.”

Were the consequences of such an argument not so grave—and I will come to those consequences shortly—it would be possible to simply dismiss this article as the nonsense that it is. To reduce the complexity of the political violence in Nigeria and Sudan to instances of “Christophobia,” for example, is simply ludicrous, as is the suggestion that somehow Western political and media figures have been “reticent” or “silent” when it comes to Darfur. This is in no way to downplay the full horror of these situations; indeed, what is most disturbing here is Hirsi Ali’s cursory citing of them—Nigeria merits just two paragraphs of her article, Sudan just one—in the service of her hateful argument.

In other cases, what is striking is the utter thinness of the arguments she tries to marshal. When, for example, she tries to make the case that “not even Indonesia...has been immune to the fevers of Christophobia,” she cites data complied by the Christian Post suggesting an increase in violent incidents against religious minorities of nearly forty percent between 2010 and 2011. Again, this is certainly a cause for concern, but it would be interesting to ask Hirsi Ali how she would compare this increase to the more than fifty percent increase in hate crimes against Muslims in the United States between 2009 and 2010, as reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She might also have turned to data on Indonesia produced by Human Rights Watch rather than that of an obscure Christian website, which would have confirmed her point about an increase in attacks on religious minorities (including Ahmadis) in Indonesia—except that rather than attributing this increase to the rise of “Christophobia,” HRW’s conclusion about this key US ally is quite different: “The common thread is the failure of the Indonesian government to protect the rights of all its citizens.”

Of course, these sorts of fact-free claims about the “Muslim world” by conservative commentators are nothing new. What is more worthy of note, however, are those claims by Hirsi Ali that suggest a number of moves taken out of the contemporary neo-conservative playbook. Hirsi Ali’s connections to the neo-con movement—she is, among other things, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—have been widely noted. For example, Hamid Dabashi lists her prominently among the “comprador intellectuals” who have helped sell the neo-con agenda in the United States and Europe. (Indeed, it is clear that the title of her article is meant to resonate in this election season with the claims being made by conservatives about an alleged “war on Christians” here in the United States.)

One strand of this neo-conservative reasoning as it can be read out of Hirsi Ali’s article has to do with her references to Egypt. She only devotes one paragraph to Egypt, but the print version of the article includes four images (including the cover image), some quite graphic, of violence against Copts in Egypt. Hirsi Ali preludes her point by noting that the alleged rise of Christophobia in Egypt comes “in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.” Her key example is the attack by security forces on pro-Coptic protesters outside Maspero on 9 October 2011, which killed at least twenty-four people and wounded more than three hundred. From this example, Hirsi Ali moves forward with her relentlessly superficial line of argument: “By the end of the year more than two-hundred thousand Copts had fled their homes in anticipation of more attacks. With Islamists poised to gain much greater power in the wake of recent elections, their fears appear to be justified.”

The first and most obvious problem here, of course, is Hirsi Ali’s attempt to transform an attack by security forces against protesters—the sort of attack that has marked the bloody fule of the Supreme Council of Armed Force (SCAF)—into yet another example of “Muslims attacking Christians,” driven solely by the relentless power of Christophobia. The deeper problem, and the one that betrays the mark of neo-con logic, is her implication that the source of this violence springs from, not the US-supported and armed military junta currently ruling Egypt, but the forces supposedly unleashed by the Arab Spring. This becomes clear in the final sentence, which resonates with the neo-con mantra that has been constant since the beginnings of the popular uprisings: if they get their democracy, we’ll wind up with the Islamists.

This disdain for the forces of democracy in Egypt (as contrasted to the neo-cons’ own preferred model of “democracy promotion” through military intervention) becomes even clearer in the admiring take on Hirsi Ali’s article posted on the blog of the National Review by Nina Shea. Concurring with Hirsi Ali’s thesis regarding the rise of Christophobia in the region, Shea adds, “Unfortunately, Arab democracy in Iraq and Egypt, the ancient homelands of two of the three largest Middle Eastern Christian communities, seems to be exacerbating the religious persecution.” (“Arab democracy,” we are thus invited to conclude, must be quite different from, say, “Western-style democracy.”)

As Shea notes, Hirsi Ali also uses the example of violence against Christians in Iraq, which is again awarded a full paragraph of attention. “Egypt is not the only Arab country that seems bent on wiping out its Christian minority,” she writes, continuing her “fair-minded assessment.” She goes on to note the rise in violence against Iraqi Christians since 2003, and the fact that thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled the country—“as the result of violence directed specifically against them”—leading to what she calls “an incipient genocide or ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq.”

And then, she moves on. The fact that 2003 is hardly an arbitrary date is not so much as acknowledged. Here we find yet another example of the almost unbelievable gall exhibited by neo-cons, as part of the larger forgetting of the war on Iraq in the United States. That Hirsi Ali—who was, like her neo-con colleagues, a vocal supporter of the war—can avoid not only accepting responsibility for the shattering of Iraqi society, but can actually use this shattering to advance her own hideous Islamophobic arguments, is simply obscene. Just as she fails to acknowledge that the attacks on pro-Coptic protesters in Egypt need to be understood within the larger framework of SCAF’s systematic attacks on all protesters, so she refuses to acknowledge that the thousands of Christians who have fled from Iraq are part of the one and a half million Iraqis who have been made refugees by the war she supported.

This forgetting of the carnage unleashed by the criminal war against Iraq is especially important today, as some of the same neo-con forces have not ceased to bang the drums for a new war against Iran. Hirsi Ali, not surprisingly, whole-heartedly endorses an attack on Iran. This is one of the clear dangers presented by her article in the current moment. I had decided not to mention another, more intimate connection between Hirsi Ali and neo-con ideology, represented by her marriage to the dean of neo-imperialists, Niall Ferguson. But it becomes impossible not to mention this connection when, in the very same issue of Newsweek—in fact, only four pages away from her article—we find an article by Ferguson, arguing vigorously for supporting an Israeli attack on Iran, using logic that could have been lifted straight out of the pro-war op-eds of 2002 (“Sometimes a preventive war can be a lesser evil than a policy of appeasement.”) Hirsi Ali only manages to work Iran into her argument regarding “Christophobia” in an indirect way, but given her long-standing views—she has, for example, argued that the Bush administration should have attacked Iraq and Iran after 9/11—her larger framework is clearly intended to support this march towards a new war.

But this is still not the most insidious aspect of Hirsi Ali’s argument. This becomes apparent only as she reaches her conclusion, which begins with a reiteration of her two theses: “It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and underreported problem.” Helpfully, she goes on to offer an explanation for both aspects of the problem. This “global war on Christians” is not, she suggests, the result of coordination by “some international Islamist agency.” “In that sense,” she goes on, “the global war on Christians isn’t a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.”

In a word: Muslims are killing Christians because Muslims hate Christians. And if this global war remains “underreported,” Muslims are to blame for this as well: part of the reason for “the media’s reticence on the subject,” she suggests, “may be the fear of provoking additional violence,” but the “most likely” explanation is “the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.” Such groups, she concludes, “have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called ‘Islamophobia’—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.”

We discover a few important things here. The first is that the seeming disconnectedness of Hirsi Ali’s argument is in fact intentional. There is no need to draw logical or factual connections between the various incidents she raises because the logic can be found in the very structure of her thesis: what she cites are simply examples of Muslims attacking Christians, and Muslims attack Christians because Muslims hate Christians. When Egyptian security forces attack Coptic protesters, it is not the army attacking protesters; it is Muslims attacking Christians. When Iraqi Christians flee the violence of a country destroyed by a US-led war and occupation, it is not Iraqis fleeing from carnage; it is Christians fleeing from Muslims. Hirsi Ali has developed the perfect machine for circulating and defending Islamophobia, since it directly implicates every individual Muslim in the actions of every other individual Muslim—not to mention the actions of any government of any Muslim-majority state. And, as an added bonus, it even manages to implicate the imputing of Islamophobia itself as part of the problem, since she sees this as part of the sinister “conspiracy of silence” that allows this global Christophobia to flourish.

Hirsi Ali’s “war,” in other words, guarantees the continuing stigmatization of Muslims in North America and Europe. This is what allows her to speak of a “global war on Christians in the Muslim world.” In addition to resonating with the US’s “global war on terror,” what this phrase signifies is that the Islamic “threat” is a global one. So what might appear to be a minority community under siege in the United States, Hirsi Ali suggests, is in fact part of a threatening wave of genocide; the “spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities” exists, in inchoate form, everywhere. No one (Christian) is safe.

Allow me to state the obvious, which is that Hirsi Ali’s argument has an immediately recognizable pedigree. The attempt to justify the oppression of minority groups by producing them as threats to “our way of life”—including the assertion that the same groups have the mysterious power to bewitch, dupe, and silence the unwary through conspiratorial means and shadowy organizations—has been a standard practice of racism and fascism, those precursors of Islamophobia; Hirsi Ali is a connoisseur of all three. Her supposed defense of an embattled minority is a thinly disguised attempt to extend and expand the ongoing repression of Muslim minority communities. The logic of her argument is precisely the same as that which has underwritten the violent policing of Muslim communities in the name of fighting “homegrown terrorism,” which has had such horrific consequences for these communities (not to mention for civil liberties more generally).

Hirsi Ali, like Ferguson and the rest of the neo-con forces, is eager to wrap herself in the mantle of “Western” virtues such as skepticism and secularism, against the forces of sectarianism and fundamentalism that they see as constitutive of the “Muslim world.” But what could possibly be more sectarian and fundamentalist than Hirsi Ali’s vision of the world, with its terrifying simplifications and generalizations, and its reduction of genuine situations of violence and suffering to data whose only purpose is to power her relentless Islamophobia machine?

21 comments for "Ayaan Hirsi Ali's War"

We know Ayaan here in Holland very well. She is indeed a sick women scarred by personal trauma's and driven by a deep grudge against anything islamic. She left Holland because in the light of the "propoganda war on Islam", the neo-cons find her a usefull asset.

It is a known fact that Hirsi Ali is a lying stooge. If her life was under such threat, why on Earth is her place so publicly known? Often when victims of rape, loan sharks et al want to make their story public, they at least have a pseudonym and not go on national television.

Also, since when was Christianity the issue? Why does she fail to mention the treatment of Christians from some of the Jews in Israel?

sakib wrote on February 10, 2012 at 07:16 PM

It would take a book to respond to Ms Ali. Here's that book http://www.twf.org/Library/WaronIslam.html — the ebook is FREE, and it' available in English, Arabic, Chinese.

Just to put Anthony Alessandrini's own alarmist hysterics into perspective regarding anti-muslim hatecrimes, I've pulled the data from the FBI web page.

Of the 1,575 victims of an anti-religious hate crime: 71.9 percent were victims because of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias. 8.4 percent were victims because of an anti-Islamic bias. 3.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Catholic bias. 2.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Protestant bias. 0.7 percent were victims because of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias. 8.3 percent were victims because of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion). 4.3 percent were victims because of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).

Of the 1,552 victims of an anti-religion hate crime: 67.0 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias. 12.7 percent were victims of an anti-Islamic bias. 4.2 percent were victims of an anti-Catholic bias. 3.0 percent were victims of an anti-Protestant bias. 0.5 percent were victims of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias. 9.1 percent were victims of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion). 3.5 percent were victims of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).

So we go from 132ish anti Muslim hatecrimes to.... wait for it.... all hell is really breaking loose out there- Muslims aren't even safe on the streets .... wait for it.....

to 197ish. Wow, in a nation of hundreds of millions you have less than 200 anti-muslim hate crimes a year. Alessandrini really had to massage the data to come up with something alarmist there - and in doing so really impeaches his credibility.

And there are still over 5 times the number of anti-jewish hate crimes.

Pedro Holguin wrote on February 11, 2012 at 05:09 PM

I bristle everytime I see the expression "Arab Spring". The Arab Spring was in 1919 when the British and Arab forces defeated the Turks in Western Arabia and then went all the way through Palestine to Damascus. England promised an independent Palestinian state which would include Western Arabia, Palestine, Syria and Iraq for the Arab participation in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. The vision was for the Arab people to re-establish an independent state free of Turkish occupation. The Hashamites were the long established legitimate authority of the area. France and Britain had other ideas. Well the Soviets refused to take part in a three nation secret agreement to carve up the liberated Arab territories among the nations of France, England and the newly established USSR. The Brits allowed the Zionists into Palestine after a thousand years of the Diaspora, and the Jews living there occupied only 5% of the territory.The French invaded Syria and immediately banned the new democratic and legitimate Parliament of Syria, carved out a Christian majority state from Syria, Lebanon, gave away a port city to Turkey and made Syria a department of France governed from the French parliament in Paris. After WWII the French tried to re-enter Syria bombing Damascus but the Brits persauded them that colonialism in the Middle East was too costly. Nevertheless history shows that the Brits cleverly carved out a tiny oil rich delta called Kuwait independent of Iraq to serve as a supply depot for the British Navy. The desert dynasty of the Saudis from Eastern Arabia eventually took over the holy cities of Western Arabia from the Hashamites. But the Western Powers have been happy with supporting all of these oil kingdoms as well as military juntas. Anti communism was a lame excuse for making deals quite favorable to capitalists and the expansion of the Western military power.

What about Hindu violence against Christians? This is also an under-reported area. Many Hindus living under Christian liberal values in UK and USA support and send money to rabid Hindus organisations like RSS that commit violence against Christians in india. I have also lived in Persian Gulf states and can attest personally to what Hirsi Ali says. To grant Muslims the same rights as others in western societies is the equivalent of western society committing harakiri. Alessandrini is just a clever parlayer of words who simply questions Hirsi Ali without giving any figures and statistics of his own.

Agen wrote on February 12, 2012 at 10:01 AM

Anthony, thank you for your cogent analysis of Ms. Ali's essay.I posted a link to your reply on The Daily Beast web site, where her essay appears.Coming at this from this at a more oblique angle, Tina Brown, Harvey Weinstein and Barry Diller are in a bit a financial bind trying to boost the circulation of Newsweek, after their purchase of it from the Washington Post group. So the appearance of Ms. Ali's essay should not surprise, as a tool to boost the circulation of a old print warhorse. Ms. Brown is an adept in the specialized necromancy associated with journalistic revivals of the corpses of the print age. Not to speak of Mr. Ferguson's association with that project and his marriage to Ms. Ali. All very cozy and politically destructive, when your money is riding on the success of a gamble: all very suggestive of a particular kind arrogance. Increasing the circulation of Newsweek is of utmost concern and if yellow journalism is your chosen methodology, so be it. The Free Market is morally vacuous, as is the troika of Brown,Diller and Weinstein. Best regards

What a bizarre debunking article! You offer abstract, vague generalizations to avoid confronting an awkward, painful, and difficult reality: a particularly violent, intolerant, and imperialist version of jihadist Islam has contributed to the murders of thousands in the last decade. For whatever reason, the same holy texts seem to be widely "misunderstood" by bigoted zealots from Nigeria to Egypt to Iraq to Pakistan to Indonesia to Thailand. Brutal bombings have occurred in Bali, Madrid, London, Tel Aviv, New York, and Moscow. It behooves leftist intellectuals - who would love to dismiss this growing fanatical faith - to confront a simple question. What if they are wrong that economic conditions alone explain these brutal crimes, and radical Islamic terrorists really do want to spread Sharia around the globe? What then?

Eric Roth wrote on February 13, 2012 at 04:59 AM

@Eric, what of the of the numerous bombings and wars waged by the West against its fellow Christians in the past century alone, from Nazi criminality to the US'role in Latin America!?! no one is looking for deep rooted explanations that could boil down to an unpalatable reality which is maybe that Westerners are simply a very racist lot. I agree with the author who speaks of complexities such as in Nigeria where the latest bomb in the North of the country caused the death of Muslims only. In fact the majority of the victims of Islamist campaigns are Muslim, but lets not let facts come in the way of some good groundless Muslim bashing...the new antisemitism in other words...As for Chrisitians victims they are victims of the situations in their own countries just as their Muslim counterparts...and in some cases like Iraq simply the victims of once again Western policy since it as a well known fact that Christians leaved in peace in pre-US invaded Iraq..get ure facts right and then bring a valid argument to the debate

Hania wrote on February 13, 2012 at 09:44 AM

Ooff, nice to see a few comments for a change. Yes, to Eric and Nancy. Personally, when I see 'neo con', and 'imperialist' in a text, I usually turn off.

What I would like to see is more articles on precisely the subjects that are evoked, apostasy, sharia law etc. Latest about the Saudi tweeter guy arrested in Malaysia just goes to show how much the muslim world operates on double standards. Using western technology to repress and kill is really disgusting. Either ban the technology or REFORM !

frenchy wrote on February 13, 2012 at 09:46 AM

What is Newsweek's agenda in carrying this story? I have lost respect for this magazine.

Hussain K wrote on February 13, 2012 at 11:13 AM

I am mildly amused by the number of times I've seen the term "it is a well known fact" on this page. Just like it is a well known fact that this is a pro-islamic publication and it is a well known fact that the most hateful, violent, death obsessed religion is often mistakenly referred to as the religion of peace.

Please let us make dua for Ayaan, only Allah swt can remove all diseases :)

MuslimBlogger wrote on February 14, 2012 at 09:42 AM

No surprise the fascist liberals and Muslims are smearing a woman for daring to defend Christians.

Rocky Lore wrote on February 16, 2012 at 01:06 PM

Hania:

In fact the majority of the victims of Islamist campaigns are Muslim, but lets not let facts come in the way of some good groundless Muslim bashing...

Wow, Hania, that's a great point.

I seem to believe the biggest victims in the United States from Christian fundamentalists are not Muslims but non-Muslims (abortion providers) and most likely Christian.

I'm sure you'll be the first to point this out on any Mad Watch thread/article/website that discusses anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States.

After all, Hania, you wouldn't want facts to get in the way of your absurd logic.

AbuBooBoo wrote on February 16, 2012 at 01:57 PM

9000 mainly Muslims died in Syria, 300 Muslims died in Egypt, 1000 in Libya, 1 Million sunni muslim refugee in Iraq are figures that we cant ignore. We cant generalize the revolutions as war on Christians when more Muslims died through out the revolutions.

600,000 reported death in Iraq by UN of Muslims but we over emphasize on the small number of Christians that got prosecuted.

Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in Middle East for thousands of years but some ignorant people attack other faith does not represent the majority. Why do we always exaggerate and generalize MUSLIMS from the acts of the few.

alhaaj wrote on February 23, 2012 at 03:21 AM

I wish the non Muslims who praise Ayyan Hersi knew how ignorant she actually is on her subject. She speaks topically and uses theatrics as a tactic to add the illusion of depth. The people who praise her do not know she gets paid to act the fool and to make fools out of the ignorant.

Ayan is one of those people who will be a thorn in the side of truth, like the rest of the neocons. She is very ignorant of Islam, but she has an adopted agenda. She's an opportunist who enjoys the $ and the spotlight by serving someone else's agenda. There are many alarmist Islamophobes who are hypocritically hypercritical of all things Islam, but what gets to me is the perceived credibility she has because she is a former nominal Muslim. Why should that not potentially be a detractor to her credibility, if her obvious lack of real knowledge about Islam isn't enough?

Any real Muslim knows that persecution of religious minorities (particularly Christians and Jews) is strictly prohibited, and that the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is on record saying that he will stand against any such persecutors on the Day of Judgement. If Ayan is truly concerned about Christian minorities, she need only reach out to the community of practicing Muslims, rather than allying herself with neocons who have been calling for drops being dropped from thousands of feet onto the heads of Muslims and Christians alike.

Amuslimguy wrote on March 03, 2012 at 12:18 PM

Ayan is one of those people who will be a thorn in the side of truth, like the rest of the neocons. She is very ignorant of Islam, but she has an adopted agenda. She's an opportunist who enjoys the $ and the spotlight by serving someone else's agenda. There are many alarmist Islamophobes who are hypocritically hypercritical of all things Islam, but what gets to me is the perceived credibility she has because she is a former nominal Muslim. Why should that not potentially be a detractor to her credibility, if her obvious lack of real knowledge about Islam isn't enough?

Any real Muslim knows that persecution of religious minorities (particularly Christians and Jews) is strictly prohibited, and that the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is on record saying that he will stand against any such persecutors on the Day of Judgement. If Ayan is truly concerned about Christian minorities, she need only reach out to the community of practicing Muslims, rather than allying herself with neocons who have been calling for drops being dropped from thousands of feet onto the heads of Muslims and Christians alike.

Amuslimguy wrote on March 03, 2012 at 12:19 PM

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave woman, I should tell everyone here. I praise her for the fearless journalism that is meant to open the eyes of the oblivious and hurt the haters. I myself live in a Christian community here in the Philippines that is constantly persecuted by Islamists and I can relate to her every word she said in her article. Christophobia is real, it is happening. Haters can say what they want but it is understandably normal for the offended to speak out. Again, it's a good thing that someone finally brought Christophobia to world's attention.